Elena can speak, but she is afraid to because of what and who is around her and she can see no alternative. People can often feel suppressed and controlled by their environments and those around them. My mother and father haunt every frame of this film.Ĭan you talk a little about why you chose to make your central protagonist - and victim - mute.
#BEYOND THE BLACK RAINBOW SKIN#
Our shooting schedule was very short but we managed to pull it off by the skin of our teeth.ĭid the fact that your dad is a film director and your mum an artist influence your choice of career and the making of this film?Ībsolutely and completely. I realised I could spend years hunting for financing or I could use the resources at my disposal to make something as I wanted to see it right away. After my father died, time seemed of the essence. It was self-financed with Tombstone DVD residuals. The budget, by industry standards, was a "micro-budget". Were there any problems you encountered while shooting as a result of the budget? What sort of budget did you have and how difficult was it to get funding for a film that has such a lot of experimental elements within it.
#BEYOND THE BLACK RAINBOW MOVIE#
The movie is kind of a kaleidoscope of my memories, emotions and fascinations from that time. I've seen and internalised countless movies in my life, but I made a conscious decision not to go back and look at most of those movies from the past I suspected were inspiring this train of thought so that they would manifest in a more abstracted way. The core inspiration for the film was to make one of those "imagined" movies. If you don't have access to something you want, you create your own version of it. What inspired you to choose that period feel and how you did you approach those influences in order to create something that is distinctive and unique?Īs a kid I was not allowed to watch violent or R-rated movies, but I would spend hours in the video store looking at the box covers and reading the descriptions on the back and then imagine my own versions of what I thought these movies would be like. The film premiered at Tribeca Film Festival and we talked to Cosmatos about the influences he drew on to make his film and some of its striking imagery.īeyond The Black Rainbow is set in the early Eighties and has a very distinctive retro vibe, recalling work by John Carpenter, Stanley Kubrick and Andrei Tarkovsky among others. It tells the story of a woman (Eva Allan) trapped in a laboratory and her desire to escape from the sinister clutches of scientist Barry Nyle (Michael Rogers). But unless you’re among those who still drop acid as a midnight-movie apéritif, your enjoyment of this retro oddity remains far from guaranteed.Panos Cosmatos introduces his film at Tribecaīeyond The Black Rainbow is the visually trippy debut from writer/director Panos Cosmatos.
Meanwhile, Norm Li’s psychedelic photography, a riot of kaleidoscopic swirls and vermilion washes, accepts only complete surrender.
Close-ups of a needle penetrating gnarled toes and a mutant slathered in what I choose to believe is bittersweet chocolate make as much sense as the scary drawings of angry vulvas hiding in a drawer. Their home is a gloomy, underpopulated clinic outfitted with cavernous air shafts and mysterious doors, where the staff members behave as oddly as the inmates. A barely discernible narrative introduces the creepy interactions of a bewigged, pill-guzzling doctor (Michael Rogers) and his heavily medicated patient (Eva Allan), a lovely young prisoner who does little except stumble around like a near-catatonic rag doll. Inspired by the purple art on the cases of old horror vidoes, this barking-mad feature from Panos Cosmatos pilfers from many playbooks (including those of Stanley Kubrick and Kenneth Anger) without functioning as a homage to one. The film’s setting is the 1980s, but its vibe is pure ’70s - the kind of trippy sci-fi mind bomb that mushroomed in smoky campus theaters after dark and before thickheaded sobriety reminded us that we still had papers to write. Everyone is high on something in “Beyond the Black Rainbow,” a spaced-out throwback to a time when we fired up the bong, cued up “Tubular Bells” and plugged in the lava lamp.
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